Intel (INTC) has never been much associated with glitz. The chipmaker, after all, essentially sells high-tech widgets that few people think much about these days. But nearly everybody at times has a question or a complaint about PCs–the inspiration for an Intel-sponsored Web site that plans to add to the star power in Las Vegas next week.

The PC.com site, which posts articles and other resources to help computer owners and prospective buyers, was launched with very little promotion last year. Though it doesn’t go out of its way to hide the affiliation with Intel, it doesn’t exactly advertise it either–preferring to keep a bit of editorial distance from its deep-pocketed parent.

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It was a good day for Web workers who build applications. On the one hand, Google released their Visualization API, which provides sophisticated ways to display tabular data with relatively little coding. On the other hand, we have the launch of the Amazon Fulfillment Web Service, which allows anyone to use Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and packers to ship physical products to their customers.

Taken together these–and other APIs that are already out there, from Google Charts to Amazon S3 and ECC–are making it increasingly possible to build complex real-world Web applications without supercoders. But there’s a threat, too: the more services you depend on, the more points of failure you have, as demonstrated by last month’s Amazon S3 Outage.

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